Landscape and Storm go public

Finally, a couple of projects I’ve been working on in the last year and a half have been made public, which means that I have more freedom to talk about them openly.

Landscape

Landscape is a system we’ve created to allow administrators to comfortably manage and observe a large number of computers remotely through a centralized web interface.

This description certainly won’t strike anyone as a brand new idea. There are indeed a large number of systems for remote management. Even then, Landscape does bring new ideas into that known field, such as a very flexible package management offering. Landscape, supporting only Ubuntu at the present moment, also has the advantage of being built inside the company which supports the operating system distribution itself.

There are currently 5 core developers, with many other people contributing in various areas. My role is being a Technical Lead, even though that says very little about the kind of relationship that we have within the project. The guys I work with are very smart and goal oriented, so decisions are taken through friendly discussions and consensus, and initiative is seen coming from all directions.

Storm

Storm is a ORM we have developed for Python, to be used in Landscape, Launchpad, and other projects. The project was originally started because our attempts to perform client side partitioning (sharding) of data with existent ORMs for Python failed.

It was announced as an open source project in a talk I presented last month at EuroPython, and last week the second public release (0.10) was already made.

If you are around the Boston area in the US, my coworker and friend Christopher Armstrong will be giving a Storm talk at the Cambridge Python Meetup today. I’ll also be presenting it again at PyCon Brasil at the end of the month, in Joinville, Brazil.